Oh, Jesus Christ! I thought my Just Hink migraines were over!
Daniel
Why? That’s exactly how it works. If your lover cops a feel on you, it’s great; if a stranger cops a feel on you, it’s probably assault. Unless you wanted to have a feel copped by that stranger, in which case it’s not.
When a person makes an aggressive sexual advance toward another person and they lack a reasonable expectation that the other person will welcome it, sure, they’re assaulting the other person. However, if the other person turns out to want that sexual advance, then the “assaulter” got lucky: their crime ended up not ahaving a victim, ended up not hurting anyone, and they get off scot free.
It would be bizarre to prosecute someone in that case, I think.
cuahetc., as long as you’re not advocating the “all sex is rape” baloney, that’s cool – from your first posts, it wasn’t entirely clear where you stood on that. However, you misrepresent me: I’m not saying that “one can reasonably expect consent to have been given when consent can reasonably be expected to have been given.”
Note that Surreal’s surreal OP didn’t talk about reasonable expectation of consent: it talked about explicit consent, and suggests that lacking explicit consent for a specific sex act, the initiator of the act was raping the other person. I was pointing out that in many relationships, the partners have a reasonable expectation that certain sexual advances will be wanted, and so they don’t need to obtain separate permission slips for each cuddle and stroke.
No, I’m not laying down any criteria for when there’s a reasonable expectation of consent: I’m not qualified to do that. I’m just pointing out that it’s the reasonable expectation of consent, not the higher standard of specific consent, that must be met in order to distinguish a legit sexual advance from assault.
Daniel
Daniel,
I wasn’t clear at all.
Using Jjimm’s example as a base…
Let say Jjimm falls asleep exactly like he says. He wakes up and Woman X is ravaging him. He finds her attractive and is fine with iy.
Now say it is Woman Y and he wakes up and is repulsed. He cries rape (just an example not anything about Jjimm personally)
The exact same act performed by two different strangers merits a felony in one case but is perfectly ok in the other.
This is what bothers me.
I meant my original posting to be between 2 different people of the ‘same status’ (strangers or whatever), not between lover and stranger.
Clearer?
Unfortunately, the question of whether or not rape occured isn’t that easy to nail down. Central to the issue seems to be whether or not the initiator of the sex act believed the victim would consent or not - ie, did the initiator think the “victim” would want it, if he or she did ask? In the OP, I would say “not rape” because the typical wife would expect the typical husband to consent, if asked if he would like to be woken up by a blowjob. I sure would. If it was a matter of a stranger breaking into my house and trying to give me a blowjob, I wouldn’t like it, and thus it would be rape. (Note: I recognize that according to X~Slayer’s post, a blowjob wouldn’t count as “rape”, but the principal still holds.)
So it seems that, in cases where the lack of consent isn’t obvious (ie, where the victim didn’t explicitly say “No”, or otherwise resist), there are two key questions: First, did the perpetrator legitimately expect that the victim would not object (ie, not mind) to the sexual act? And secondly, is this expectation reasonable? Unfortunately, these questions aren’t always cut and dried. That’s why we have juries. Nevertheless, I think it’s important that the law in this case (and in others) be left deliberately vague to some extent, because once you hammer it down too specifically, you wind up with a situation where some things that should be rape aren’t, and some things that shouldn’t be rape are.
As an example, it seems that currently, if two college kids go out on a date, both get equally drunk, then go home and have sex, this would be considered rape, even though common sense tells you that calling it rape is silly - it’s not rape, it’s a couple of kids getting smashed and then getting laid. It’s for cases like this that some laws should be left purposefully non-specific, so a human element can be inserted to ensure that the spirit of the law is being obeyed, in addition to the letter.
Jeff
ElJeffe,
Do you believe that rape can occur in instances where the two people consent to heterosexual sex?
To make the question clearer…
Do you believe that ignorance, or lack there of, plays a role in whether rape is occurring?
Let’s say that someone could walk in the room, just before sex was going to occur and submit an argument that would immediately terminate the prior sexual consent into permanent non-consent. It is my opinion that this person sets the standard for what rape is or isn’t in this particular scenario, not necessarily the two parties involved.
Understanding that this hypotheitcial person is not always present in a given room where sex is going to occur,
does it make sense to analyse the quality of such “anti-consent” logics into the law as a whole, in order to address the topic of informed consent to more individuals as a whole, with respect to what society has recieved as a gift as “lessons learned”?
Oral sex is OK if both parties are hygienic and sanitary and medically non-infectious or non-contageious. But watch out for Manhattan, the moderator. He closed one thread on Lesbians/dildos.
About rape, yes it is always wrong as defined with the use of force. In my view force is always wrong even with your spouse, because in marriage the right to sex goes with the duty to love and honor; so you have got to demand your sex without compromising your duty to love and honor. Try persuasion, for the other party has also the duty of the conjugal debt.
I will stop here; for Manhattan might step in and declare: “This has gone far enough”.
Susma Rio Sep
“One could also think of it in non-sexual terms; would you rather have someone force your arm into a hole in the ground, or shove something up your nose? Which would feel less traumatic to you?”
You need to tweak the analogy a bit to really make it fit:
Would you rather have someone force your arm into a steel bear trap – with the knowledge that if you attempted to resist, it might clamp down and sever or severly injure your limb – or shove something up your nose?
t_leave:
The one instance I can think of that even approaches this would be a case where one person was pretending to be another - eg, I dress up as some woman’s husband, and commence intercourse. Other than that, no.
No. I could walk in on a couple about to have sex, and inform the girl that the guy has been cheating on her. This would likely cause her to revoke consent, and never wish to offer consent again. This doesn’t mean rape would’ve occured if not for my intervention. I think the only case in which “ignorance” could be as a case for rape would be if one person was pretending to be another.
Jeff
Oh lordy. It took me a while to realize that you meant oral sex. For a second there, I thought you were fresh out of Catholic school and has some really screwed up ideas about female genitalia.
With a word like “rape”, it would be helpful if there were only one definition, but unfortunately there are many. I think one of the problems with a discussion like this is that if you don’t establish a working definition going forward, everybody brings their own notions of “rape” to the table and we all wind up speaking different jargon.
Like many in my generation, I was presented with a lot of information about rape and sexual assault when I got to college. The explanations presented here are pretty close to what I was exposed to.
I never heard anyone propose that people get “permission slips” prior to sexual activity, but it was suggested that questions like “May I put my hand on your breast?” and “May I put my penis in your vagina?” were necessary parts of foreplay. This is not a joke, I am being serious. I remember discussing it with a good friend who was in favor of incorporating this definition of consent into our school’s disciplinary code, as they did at Brown, and I remarked that it sounded puritanical and extreme, not to mention a serious mood-killer. She disagreed, and maintained that it was simply about respect.
This is getting MPSIMS-y, but just humor me. Of course, college campuses are bubbles and have nothing to do with the real world, but these ideas really did inform my views on rape and sexual assault. My reaction to being exposed to such ideas was not to start asking permission, but to think differently about the behavior I was engaging in. I began thinking “What I did with my girlfriend last night could technically be considered sexual assault, because she didn’t explicitly give me permission to have sex with her.” Sure it was weird to think of it that way, but I don’t think I could’ve brought myself to say “May I touch the back of your throat with my tongue?” And I think she would’ve broken up with me if I had.
Surreal hasn’t come back to the thread lately, but I suspect that these sorts of attitudes are what he was referring to in the OP. Unfortunately, I don’t know that there are any easy answers to his questions.
cuauhtemoc (long ago) stated that:
" think we’d all agree that if a guy, even her husband, forced her to have sex with him against her will, it’s irrelevant that
a. they’ve had sex before
b. she didn’t object to having sex in other circumstances
c. she once commented that it was a fantasy of hers
d. she never expressed the idea that she would not like him to do this to her
If this woman were you or someone you loved, how would you like to hear a prosecutor asking these questions? "
I, for one, agree that these considerations are irrelevant. At the same time, I would encourange any attourney for the defense or prosecution to ask these questions if need be. I would also encourage my hypothetical loved one (mother, sister, wife , or daughter) to answer these questions with head held high. There is no shame in having consensual sex nor in having forced-sex fantasies, even if the above were to involve adultery.
The only true shame is on the rapist or the false accusor. The facts of the case will reflect the truth of that more often than not.
Going back to the OP, if I were a conqueror any time prior to about 1000 AD, particularly if a ‘barbarian’, then was not killing all the men and enslaving and raping the women so that their children would be of my blood fairly standard practice?
You mean that the person who had a wife was not pretending to be another person? What would compell such a person to not mention this small detail? Ignorance about what effect it could have on the decision? Maybe it was knowledge about what effect it could have on the decision. Maybe it’s an issue of self awareness. The point is, this person only has the luxury of being able to claim that they weren’t “pretending to be another person”, because of ignorance.
This makes ignorance a COMMODITY! Intentional or not, it makes ignorance a commodity with which to perpetrate what would otherwise be rape. This is precisely what Justhink argued. In arguing this, he was arguing that this IS rape, to a person who simply is not ignorant. He argues that if the person reveals their lack of ignorance, particularly with respect to heterosexual consent, that this person will not be consented by a heterosexual female. From this, he was proposing the solution that females demand evidence from their consented partners that can only possibly generate human slavery within society as a whole. To the degree that the female is not cognitively compitent to comprehend the vastness of this dynamic, he was suggesting that all heterosexual female consent is rape.
t_leave, I don’t know who you are, and I’m not trying to be a dick, but here’s a little friendly advice: Stop invoking Justhink. He turned every thread he touched into a pile of shit. People hated him. He was banned. And he never said anything that was worth the time it took to decipher his posts. As far as I’m concerned, posting to a thread to say “Here’s what Justhink would have to say about this particular matter…” is a hijack, and unfair to the rest of the posters on this board.